The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

But Halifax, who had a profound sense of public service, guessed that Churchill would make a better war leader and refused the premiership.

By the time the Battle of Britain reached its climax, over 10 per cent of the fighter pilots in the south-east were Polish.

When told of a German deserter, a former Communist who had crossed the lines to warn of the attack, Stalin promptly ordered that he should be shot for disinformation.

The US Army needed battle experience before it could take on the Wehrmacht in major battles on the mainland of Europe.

In what was referred to as the ‘rubber-band’ effect of these campaigns, the over-extended supply line led to disaster, hauling back the attacker.

‘I can only say that this is no longer a war,’ wrote a motorcycle reconnaissance soldier, ‘but just the destruction of two world views.’

‘This was the first page of the Stalingrad defence,’ wrote Vasily Grossman, who heard first-hand accounts very soon afterwards.

The Casablanca conference was the high water mark of British influence.

Although there had been a number of women snipers who became famous for their deadly skills, the main influx came with the establishment of a woman’s sniper school in 1943. Women were considered to resist cold better than men and to have a steadier hand.

It was a young man’s war. Even a thirty-one-year-old pilot was nicknamed ‘Grandpa’.

The British had failed to grasp Patton’s cardinal rule learned after the Kasserine debacle: always seize the highest point fast and first. Topography was everything.

Roosevelt had decided that he could not afford to lose Marshall as chief of staff because of his know ledge of all theatres, his superb talent for organization and above all for his skill in dealing with Congress.

They tended to cope with fear by adopting one of two extremes: either profound fatalism, with the acceptance that they were bound to die, or else denial, convincing themselves that they were invulnerable.

Stalin’s position, with the slogan ‘Do Not Divide the Dead’, was clear. No mention was to be made of Jews as a special category when it came to suffering.

‘Psychologically’, wrote a gunner in a heavy artillery battery, ‘I am finding it increasingly hard to manage when you’ve just been having a good chat with a comrade and half an hour later you see him as little more than scraps of flesh as if he had never existed, or comrades who are lying badly wounded in front of you in a large pool of their own blood and beg you with pleading eyes to help them because in most cases they cannot speak any more, or pain takes away their power of speech. That is terrible… This war is a crushing war of nerves.’

Eisenhower, despite their long friendship, was firm. ‘Well, Brad, those are my orders,’ he said, finishing the call.

At a dinner in London a few weeks before, when Churchill had talked about the election campaign, General Slim, back from Burma, had said to him: ‘Well, prime minister, I know one thing. My army won’t be voting for you.’

Churchill’s greatest fault was to have shown no taste for social reform, during either the war or the campaign.

Perhaps the most shocking element in the whole story of Unit 731 was MacArthur’s agreement, after the Japanese surrender, to provide immunity from prosecution to all involved, including General Ishii. This deal allowed the Americans to obtain all the data they had accumulated from their experiments. Even after MacArthur had learned that Allied prisoners of war had also been killed in the tests, he ordered that all criminal investigations should cease. Soviet requests to prosecute Ishii and his staff at the Tokyo War Crimes tribunal were firmly rejected.